Adventure Site Contest 2: Foundry Ovens of the Bitter Paramore

​Written by Nicholas Alexander
AD&D (but actually LotFP), levels 5-7
Fire giant tower/forge
  On a blasted hill, squats a foundry of blackened brick & iron, belching acrid fumes day & night. Wise men call it cursed.
  What is the appeal of edge? In the year 2025, every conceivable boundary has been violated up, down, and sideways. The degenerate Mork Borg gleefully embraces a black metal aesthetic while its subject matter barely merits a raised eyebrow, everyone buying it can be comforted that nothing genuinely transgressive will appear. Lamentation of the Flame Princess adventures are often genuinely gross and stomach-churningly distasteful, but, again, it’s 2025, even when you manage to be off-putting, decades of internet means that at best you’ve added just one more goatse.jpg to the pile. If you’re playing this at the table it seems to be vaguely…sad, it means aging Millennials or Gen X chortle about norm violations that a zoomer yawns over and calls “cringe” at best. Trust me, the kids have seen it.
  Foundry Ovens is a dungeon built around a bitter and confused fire giant rapist. It’s not backstory, it’s not subtle, the fire giant is all about kidnapping local women, raping them, then melting them into iron statues while enduring erotic dreams of his mother. There’s a Cairn-esque table of kidnapping/rape victims and their personalities. Also there’s a subtheme of a leprechaun torturer who castrates prisoners and keeps one around in a gimp mask. Apply grease, heat, and a layer of soot and grime and you have your document. It’s just one trip to Hot Topic away from being sent in to LotFP. I can hear James Raggi smacking his wet tongue deep within his jowly cheeks in anticipation. The DIY MS Paint artwork would appeal to the Mork Borg crew but I suspect the subject matter would have them too uncomfortable.

  The map conveys everything well. The foundry is a lonely brick town with an iron fence and guard-hellhounds, accessed very explicitly on multiple levels with ladders and gantries (guard patrols on some of them), accessed on the roof (wyverns nearby summonable), and not accessed hardly at all by a big front door. It’s fine, nobody uses the front door. Inside the fairly complex multi-level forge is set up with a network of gantries and torture devices on the first three floors before the jail and bedroom up top. All makes sense for a fantasy layout.
  As you’d expect for the structure, the biggest risk for moving around is gravity. Fall sections outside and in couple with risky hooks where treasure or captives dangle, offering a tense thieving scene. What surprised me is that there aren’t any big damage/hazard bit relating to the intense heat in the foundry, the center has a portal to the para-elemental plane of magma, for pity’s sake (okay, actually running in the rim of the portal can make a PC pass out). I know at this level they should have resist heat options, but it’s not every party that packs enough for everyone. Vision is blurry in all the steam, that’s something at least. Damaging vent pipes can make gas explosions, which is good, while capping the magma well will explode the foundry with a 1-in-4 chance of mercifully killing every benighted soul inside. 

  Giantkin (verbeeg), hobgoblins (extra abused), and hellhounds are the “common” fight, while there’s a salting up sub-bosses in a flesh golem, a doppelganger, a ghost, an efreeti, a leprechaun…the titular Paramore himself is a reasonably tough fire giant fire, at least won’t see level 7’s fall asleep. New monster in the form of the Brides of Chlimbia, iron statues with burnt corpses inside, hard to use but also a nicely horrific threat. Your basic NPCs to talk with are victims, like Dog the castrated and lobotomized paladin who wears his own severed genitals around his neck and is completely insane. Enjoyable image, eh?
  Big chunks of treasure are carried on the bosses’ own persons (metaphor detected), the overall environment is rather parsimonious, and runs to things like a gold and pearl encrusted chastity belt or amateur paintings done on flayed human skin. There is a good “treasure” in rescuing a mad tortured merchant gives the party his family’s gratitude, that’s a good hook/reward to sprinkle into an adventure. A few of the kidnapped rape victims might help out as henchwomen if the Cairn table gets rolled on the right way. Big miss on valuation is a huge brass bell on top of the tower, being used to summon wyverns. That sucker needs a gp price tag that inspires party shenanigans for how to steal a ton of brass way the hell up in the air of a tower’s roof.
  There’s no shortage of hooks available if you’d enjoy putting this into your campaign. There’s not much way to censor or remove themes, so that’s going to be a careful choice there very much dependent on your own table’s desire for edgy content.